Is Heidegger Contaminated by Nazism?

If I had to rate the best intellectual experiences of my life, choosing the two or three most profound—a tendentious task, but there you are—one of them would be reading Heidegger. I was in my late twenties, and struggling with a dissertation on the nature of consciousness (what it is, where it comes from, how it fits into the material world). This had turned out to be an impossible subject. Everything I read succeeded only by narrowing the world, imagining it to be either a material or a spiritual place—never both.

Then, in the course of a year, I read Heidegger’s 1927 masterwork, “Being and Time,” along with “The Essence of Truth,” a book based on a series of lectures that Heidegger gave in 1932. It was as if, having been trapped on the ground floor of a building, I had found an express elevator to the roof, from which I could see the stars. Heidegger had developed his own way of describing the nature of human existence. It wasn’t religious, and it wasn’t scientific; it got its arms around everything, from rocks to the soul. Instead of subjects and objects, Heidegger wanted to talk about “beings.” The world, he argued, is full of beings—numbers, oceans, mountains, animals—but human beings are the only ones who care about what it means to be themselves. (A human being, he writes, is the “entity which in its Being has this very Being as an issue.”) This gives us depth. Mountains might outlast us, but they can’t out-be us. For Heidegger, human being was an activity, with its own unique qualities, for which he had invented names: thrownness, fallenness, projection. These words, for him, captured the way that we try, amidst the flow of time, to “take a stand” on what it means to exist. (Thus the title: “Being and Time.”)

In “The Essence of Truth,” meanwhile, Heidegger proposed a different and, to my mind, a more realistic idea of truth than any I’d encountered before. He believed that, before you could know the truth about things, you had to care about them. Caring comes first, because it’s caring about things that “unconceals” them in your day-to-day life, so that they can be known about. If you don’t care about things, they stay “hidden”—and, because there are limits to our care, to be alive is “to be surrounded by the hidden.” (A century’s worth of intellectual history has flowed from this insight: that caring and not caring about things has a history, and that this history shapes our thinking.) This is a humble way to think about truth. It acknowledges that, while we claim to “know” about a lot of things intellectually, we usually seek and know the deeper truth about only a few. Put another way: truth is as much about what we allow ourselves to experience as it is about what we know.

When I read Heidegger’s books, I “knew”—but didn’t particularly care—that he had been a Nazi. (He joined the party in 1933, the year after giving the lectures behind “The Essence of Truth.”) I was so fascinated by his philosophy that his Nazism stayed “hidden”; though his ideas felt vivid and present, his biography belonged to the past. But, over the past few months, not caring has become more difficult. That’s largely because of a philosophy professor named Peter Trawny, who has begun publishing some of Heidegger’s anti-Semitic writings. Trawny is the director of the Martin Heidegger Institute at the University of Wuppertal, in Germany, and the editor of Heidegger’s “black notebooks,” some of which were published for the first time this spring. (Heidegger wrote in the small, black-covered notebooks for nearly forty years—publishing them all could take decades.)

It’s always been safe to assume that Heidegger, being a Nazi, was also an anti-Semite (though not necessarily a “virulent” one, whatever that term might mean). But, as my colleague Richard Brody wrote a few weeks ago, the passages reveal a particularly unsettling kind of anti-Semitism—one which hasn’t been fully visible before. They show that, even as Heidegger held the most banal and ignorant anti-Semitic beliefs (he wrote about a worldwide conspiracy of “calculating” Jews “unfurl[ing] its influence”), he also tried to formulate a special, philosophical, and even Heideggerian kind of anti-Semitism. (Jews, he writes, are “uprooted from Being-in-the World”—that is, incapable of authentically caring and knowing.) The passages, some of which were written during the Second World War, account for only a few pages out of more than a thousand. But they have alarmed and disgusted Heideggerians because they show that Heidegger himself had no trouble using his own philosophy for anti-Semitic ends. Philosophy has a math-like quality: it’s not just a vocabulary, but a system. A failure in one part of the system can suggest a failure everywhere. And so, earlier this year, in a book called “Heidegger and the Myth of Jewish World Conspiracy,” Trawny asked the inevitable question: could Heidegger’s philosophy as a whole be “contaminated” by Nazism?

When Trawny came to New York, during the second week of April, for a panel on Heidegger and Nazism hosted by the Goethe Institute, in the East Village, all sorts of Heideggerians, from the casual to the committed, came to hear him speak. The general rule seemed to be that the more time you’d spent thinking about Heidegger, the more unnerved you were by the controversy. Relaxed, curious undergrads gathered near the sunlit windows at the back of the audience. (One couple had their arms around each other, apparently on a date.) Further up, the grad students, in their too-old or too-young outfits, looked alert and inquisitive: for them, this was an issue of professional interest. A few rows on, an explosion of gray marked where the older professors huddled together. And at the front sat the panelists: Trawny, along with two American professors of philosophy, Roger Berkowitz and Babette Babich, from Bard and Fordham, respectively. Outside, it was spring. Inside, it was dim, airless, and funereal.

Because Trawny was from Germany, no one knew what he would be like in person—an incomprehensible hermeneutist? A cool judge of history? He turned out to be a tall, disarming man of fifty who sounded less like a judge than a disappointed lover. In a soft German accent, he explained what it had been like to read the notebooks for the first time. “Of course, you have passages about Hölderlin, about Nietzsche, about Bolshevism,” he said—the usual Heideggerian subjects. “But then, suddenly, a passage about the Jews.… You think, Okay, whatever.… And then suddenly you have the second, and you have the third, and you have the fourth, and you have the sixth, and you think, What the hell! Why is he doing this?” As a lifelong Heideggerian, reading and publishing these passages had been “very painful,” Trawny said; it had also introduced all sorts of practical complications into his life. “I’m the director of the Martin Heidegger Institute, and I actually want to be that for a longer time,” he said, to laughter from the audience. (“You cannot be the director of the Adolf Hitler Institute,” a colleague had warned him.) He went on, “If we would say that Heidegger really was an anti-Semitic philosopher, then, yeah, that would be really a catastrophe, in a certain way, for me.” This was true, to varying degrees, for many in the room. It was good to hear someone admit that the controversy wasn’t a matter of purely intellectual interest.

Berkowitz, who served as moderator, started things off by reading passages from the black notebooks. One began: “The Jews, with their marked gift for calculating, live, already for the longest time, according to the principle of race, which is why they are resisting its consistent application with utmost violence.” When Berkowitz finished, it was quiet enough to hear traffic on the Bowery. Then, slowly, the professors, along with members of the audience, tried to talk about what Heidegger had written. No one knew what to say; the conversation was halting and desultory. After a while, the group paused for wine and crackers—the glummest cocktail hour ever. (Later, an enraged audience member found his words, and responded to the passage by saying, “That sentence strikes me as somehow so deranged, so alien to a sense of the real. . . . Anyone who is capable of that sort of argument cannot be trusted to think.” A few people—by no means everyone—applauded.)

After the break, the group reconvened in a more reflective mood. It was pointed out that Heidegger’s sons had fought in the war (both were imprisoned in Russian P.O.W. camps)—could that account for the irrationality of his thinking? Someone else wondered how Heidegger, who had chosen to publish these notebooks, imagined people would react to them. (He set the publication schedule himself, ensuring that the black notebooks would be published last.) Had he meant, by further damaging his reputation, to atone? The anti-Semitic passages were from the nineteen-forties, which raised the question of their relevance to “Being and Time,” which was written in the nineteen-twenties. “I’ve always preferred the early Heidegger,” one man said, with evident relief.

There was a weary tone to much of the discussion, as if the Heideggerians, having been pushed around for too long, might at last have reached the end of their tolerance. Since 1987, when Victor Farías, a Chilean professor and former student of Heidegger’s, published a book called “Heidegger and Nazism,” people who care about Heidegger—that is, people who would rather spend their time thinking about the nature of Being—have found themselves forced to think about Nazis, too. Heidegger’s Nazism is now almost a field unto itself, generating biographical scholarship (Hugo Ott’s “Heidegger: A Political Life,” in 1989) and interpretive polemic (Emmanuel Faye’s “Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy”).

These books have always been controversial in themselves. But, because of them, Heideggerians have been forced to grow accustomed to a certain set of facts. When Heidegger joined the Nazi party, in 1933, he had a professional reason for doing so: it went along with his new position as the Führer-rector (the President, essentially) of Freiburg University. But he was also an enthusiast. Photographs, impossible to unsee, show him wearing a Hitler moustache; that year, Heidegger told his students, “Let not theories and ‘ideas’ be the rules of your being. The Führer himself and he alone is German reality and its law, today and for the future.” In 1935, he spoke about “the inner truth and greatness” of National Socialism. He was not a doctrinaire Nazi: one of his students recalled that, when the party instituted a series of compulsory political education lectures, Heidegger shooed a student making a party-line speech off the stage (“This jabber will stop immediately!,” he’s said to have shouted) and replaced him with a speaker who talked about Sigmund Freud. As rector, he interceded on behalf of three Jewish professors who were about to be fired, and, after the war, some of his Jewish students and colleagues declared that he wasn’t anti-Semitic. Still, in ways large and small, he happily furthered the Nazi program—he applied the regime’s “cleansing” laws to the student body, for example, denying financial aid to “non-Aryan” students.

In 1934, Heidegger gave up his rectorship, possibly under pressure from faculty members who resented the Nazis’ influence, and, over time, his reservations deepened. He didn’t share the Nazis’ biologism or technophilia, and considered their thinking crude. It’s often said that Heidegger wandered into Nazism because, with the daft egotism of a great philosopher, he thought that the Nazis agreed with him philosophically; when he realized that they weren’t intellectuals, he pulled away. He remained a member of the Party until 1945, but was on its margins. After the war, he said privately that his participation in the movement had been “the biggest stupidity of my life”; Hannah Arendt, who carried on a love affair with Heidegger for many years, said that she thought of his Nazism as an “escapade”—a poorly thought through attempt to “ ‘intervene’ in the world of human affairs.” And yet Heidegger never truly apologized for being a Nazi; even worse, he never directly and publically addressed the reality of the Holocaust before he died, in 1976. (Thomas Sheehan’s essay “Heidegger and the Nazis” is an excellent, and dispiriting, overview of the philosopher’s Nazi years.)

At the Goethe Institute, it was still possible to take comfort in the idea that, as Berkowitz put it, Heidegger was “a Nazi in a different way than other people were Nazis.” The yearning for a higher, more intellectual form of Nazism hardly absolves Heidegger—but, if you see his Nazism as a kind of special case, it’s easier to argue that it shouldn’t eclipse his intellectual legacy. Babette Babich pointed out that the trade-off is one we make all the time: many great artists and thinkers have said, done, or written things that are wrong. “I’m a Nietzschean, and Nietzscheans are used to this, because Nietzsche says terrible things about the Jews, he also says terrible things about women,” she said. Philosophy professors, she went on, had to defend the thinkers that mattered, even if they had said or done terrible things, because it was so easy for a thinker to disappear from the intellectual landscape. “To this day, Nietschze is only rarely taught at the Ph.D. level,” she said. “Heidegger’s not taught very often as it is.” In short: Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Trawny was unmoved by the idea of discretion; instead, he wanted to double down and talk it all out in public. “There’s a point where we have to say, ‘No, no, this is a point we cannot contextualize anymore,’ ” he said. “There is a responsibility to say, ‘It’s impossible—Heidegger, you cannot say that!… Even if you are the greatest philosopher of the twentieth century, this is over the limit.’ ” At the same time, he saw a way out for Heidegger in one of the philosopher’s own concepts, “errancy”—the idea that human beings are not calculators, but conjecturers, and that being wrong is, therefore, an irreducible part of being a person. (In “The Essence of Truth,” Heidegger wrote that “the errancy through which human beings stray is not something that, as it were, extends alongside them like a ditch into which they occasionally stumble; rather, errancy belongs to the inner constitution of the [existence] into which historical human beings are admitted.”) Trawny continued, “He knew, at the end of his life, what was written in these notebooks. He was aware of the problems. But he couldn’t take the pen and wipe it out. He tries to show us how deeply a philosopher can fail. I don’t know whether this interpretation is strong, but I hope so—that this could be possible.” (As to the question of “contamination,” Trawny said that he regretted, somewhat, the choice of that metaphor. It may have been “too strong.”)

On the whole, I find myself agreeing with Trawny. It’s impossible to disavow Heidegger’s thinking: it is too useful, and too influential, to be marginalized. (A few weeks ago, when I pulled “The Essence of Truth” down from my bookshelves, I found it as compelling as I had a decade ago.) But it’s also impossible to set aside Heidegger’s sins—and they cannot help but reduce the ardency with which his readers relate to him. Philosophers like to play it cool, but the truth is that intellectual life depends on passion. You don’t spend years working your way through “Being and Time” because you’re idly interested. You do it because you think that, by reading it, you might learn something precious and indispensable. The black notebooks, however seriously you take them, are a betrayal of that ardency. They make it harder to care about—and, therefore, to really know—Heidegger’s ideas. Even if his philosophy isn’t contaminated by Nazism, our relationship with him is.

“The problem is not just that I’m morally shocked—it’s also a problem that he is so dumb,” Trawny said, as the evening drew to a close. “Observe what he is writing there. You see that, like all the others, he was not better. You thought it, actually; for long years, you thought he was very clever, but he is not. This is something that requires a certain distance,” he concluded. “You shouldn’t be too much in love with what you are reading, or you will be disappointed, like always.”

Above: Martin Heidegger, circa 1950.

Joshua Rothman is The New Yorker’s archive editor. He is also a frequent contributor to newyorker.com, where he writes about books and ideas.